Posts Tagged ‘Gambino’

As of a few days ago, Donald Glover was out on tour, en route to hit 18 cities across the U.S. and Canada apparently as his last hurrah under the moniker Childish Gambino. But a reported foot injury has left Gambino unable to complete the rest of the tour, for now anyway.

Over the weekend, his show in Dallas was seemingly cut short due to his injury. Now, Fam Rothstein, one of Glover’s creative partners, has taken to Twitter to clarify that the nine remaining This Is America dates have been “postponed, not cancelled,” Billboard points out.

The first date affected is Wednesday night (September 26)’s gig at The Forum in Inglewood, California, which venue organizers announced on Twitter. Details of the injury are still unconfirmed, though TMZ reported that Glover might’ve suffered a broken foot.

Before the injury, Glover took time during his Chicago tour stop to honor fellow musician Mac Miller, who died earlier this month. “He was so nice. Y’all don’t know, like, he was the sweetest guy,” he said before launching into “Riot.” “A lot of critics were like, ‘Yo, this corny-ass white dude,’ just like they’re like, ‘Yo, this corny-ass black dude.’ And we used to talk, and this kid, he just loved music.”

Whatever the nature of his injury, Glover seems to be taking some time to get better before he ventures back out to close the live-performance chapter in Childish Gambino’s career. At the start of 2018, at the Grammys, Glover was asked if he was really retiring the Gambino persona, and he said he was.

“I stand by that,” he said at the time. “I’m really appreciative of this. I’m still making another project right now. … But I like endings. I think they’re important to progress.”

Mac Miller’s untimely death at 26 last week has ushered in a torrent of support, love, and memorializing from his peers in the music world and beyond. Notable moments came from his ex-girlfriend Ariana Grande, who posted a striking photo of Mac over the weekend, as well as fellow rappers like Chance, Kyle, Wiz Khalifa, Post Malone, and more.

At a tour stop in Chicago, as The Fader points out, Childish Gambino offered his take on Miller’s death as well, pausing the show for a heartfelt musing on how the two complemented each other through the years. As the fan-captured video below shows, Gambino began with a simple declaration: “I’m a very sensitive person… but this Mac Miller shit got me fucked up.”

“He was so nice. Y’all don’t know, like, he was the sweetest guy,” he continued. “A lot of critics were like, ‘Yo, this corny-ass white dude,’ just like they’re like, ‘Yo, this corny-ass black dude.’ And we used to talk, and this kid, he just loved music.

“We should be allowed to be sad about that. Like, my heart was broken. And I feel good about being sad because it tells me that he was special, that I had a special moment.”

Gambino used Miller’s rise, which was concurrent with his own, as a reminder that people don’t have to be beholden to the narratives and expectations and definitions that other people place on them. “We’re all way too complex to be a narrative,” he concluded, before telling Miller he loves him and dedicating his song “Riot” to him.

There probably isn’t an artist alive who could simultaneously make the summer seem like a total drag and eerily beautiful. Than again, Childish Gambino isn’t most artists. On Wednesday (July 11), Gambino released Summer Pack, which saw the Atlanta renaissance man deliver two songs — ”Summertime Magic” and “Feels Like Summer” — about the hottest season. The latter of the pack is where Childish uses the metaphor of summer to illustrate a growing list of anxieties.

Here is a short tally of everything Gambino is worried about: over-reliance on algorithms, global warming, water scarcity, the decline of bird and bee populations. The entire second verse deals with these overwhelming feelings of angst and dread.

Every day gets hotter than the one before
Running out of water, it’s about to go down
Go down
Air that kill the bees that we depend upon
Birds were made for singing
Waking up to no sound
No sound

In fairness to Gambino, the bees are indeed dying. A 2017 study by the Center For Biological Diversity of 4,337 North American and Hawaiian native bees found that “nearly 1 in 4 (347 native bee species) is imperiled and at increasing risk of extinction, as a result of agricultural intensification, climate change, and urbanization.” As far as water goes, the UN reported that 5 billion people might suffer from water shortages by 250, via The Guardian.

Welp, “This Is America” after all, and at least the apocalypse might be soundtracked by Gambino’s sweet falsetto.

Donald Glover and Chance the Rapper just proved that “The Worst Guys” can also be the best guys. Yesterday (June 11), Glover surprised a room full of Chicago youth at OpenMike by performing Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.” As social video reveals, as the beat to the song started playing, the auditorium erupted as students rushed to the stage, while Gambino broke out his signature dance from the video.

Glover and Chance’s relationship goes way back. The Chicago rapper opened up for Childish Gambino early in both of their careers and even teased fans with the possibility of a joint mixtape. Chance, along with the poet and activist Malcolm London, host OpenMike, which is a monthly event where Chicago high school students can present artwork to their peers and receive professional development. The monthly event honors “Brother Mike” Hawkins, who helped artists like Chance, Vic Mensa, and Saba first get their start at the YouMedia Lyricist Loft event.

Last week, FX announced that they ordered a third season of Atlanta. At an Emmys FYC screening and panel on Friday (June 8), Glover compared the upcoming season of Atlanta to one of Kanye West’s most successful albums.

“I align the seasons I think, to me, like Kanye records,” Glover told IndieWire. “I feel like this is our Graduation. This is probably our most accessible but also the realest — an honest version of it — and I feel like the most enjoyable, like the third album.”

Fans are still waiting on the long-delayed Childish Gambino and Chance the Rapper mixtape, and now Rae Sremmurd are throwing their hat into the collaboration ring. In an interview with Billboard, the rap group described the potential sound of a Sremmurd and Donald Glover project.

“I got a laptop with about 1,000 bangers,” said Swae Lee. “I know Childish Gambino got about 2,000 or 3,000, who knows? We’re gonna come together and make a whole project like, “Redbone” and “Black Beatles.”

This week, Glover announced he is embarking on a North American tour with Rae Sremmurd starting in September. Later in the Billboard interview, Slim Jxmmi reveals how the two brothers connected with the Atlanta rapper.

“Childish Gambino is a cool guy, we linked overseas in a studio,” said Jxmmi. “I DJ’d one of his house parties one time. He’s just a cool guy and we got the same type of vibe, so you can expect good music to come out of this. It’s natural. We don’t gotta act, we can just be ourselves. He’s himself everywhere he goes, and we’re gonna be ourselves everywhere we go — so it’s just gonna be like two different shows, we from two different places.”

At this point it looks like Glover might have to put off retirement to fit in all of these projects.

Taking a lead from his album title Because the Internet, Childish Gambino launched a fake porn site to promote The Deep Web tour. Gambino tweeted, “for advanced tickets for my #thedeepwebtour ask abella about “tickets”: http://abella.xxx .”

abella.xxx is a fake sex chat site starring adult star Abella Anderson. When “Tickets” is typed into the chat query, a link to The Deep Web Tour website comes up. A similar theme was used in Gambino’s “3005″ music video. In the visual, the actor/rapper and Anderson have a PG-13 sex chat.

The Deep Web Tour kicks off in London on February 4, and then hits the United States for stops including New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom and the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.

For those wondering, “The Deep Web” also known as the so-called “dark web” is the hidden part of the Internet reserved for largely illegal activities like sex, guns and drugs. It was recently featured on the cover of Time.